In this episode, I am very happy to welcome our good friend and industry leader Sean Cunnigham, CEO of the VAB, previously known as the Video Advertising Bureau. The VAB is the essential advertising industry organization for the television programmers, networks and the entire TV industry.
An ad man in previous life, Sean has been at the helm of the organization for 18 years and has seen a lot of changes.
Probably none as dramatic as what is happening now with the big switch to audience-based buying versus age and demo. Sean and his team have been guiding the industry through this transition. In this interview, speaks to the big changes in TV ad investment and what it all means from recent market research.
Sean also addresses the value and shortcomings of panels and the problems with accuracy of the Nielsen ratings during the pandemic. He says the industry expects transparency and hopes the Nielsen will fix the problems which largely remain.
A great conversation. Thank you Sean for this insightful interview. And thanks for your friendship and support for Beet.TV
And thanks to our podcast sponsor Mediaocean
And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode.
]]>“What we’ve found is that sports viewing hasn’t decreased. In fact, the opposite has been true,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “The sports audience didn’t go away when COVID hit and sports programming went away — it just shifted.”
Soon after the coronavirus was declared a pandemic in March, many professional and college sports leagues suspended operations and organizers of the Summer Olympics — typically a billion-dollar bonanza in televised sports marketing — announced the games would be delayed for a year. Soon after sports resumed in the summer, fans were overwhelmed with an abundance of competing games.
Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB, Rooke said he had observed a variety of changes in viewing behaviors because of the pandemic, including a willingness of hardcore fans to be flexible, giving advertisers more ways to reach them.
“The sports ‘super fans’ tend to move and watch other sports when their core, No. 1 sport isn’t on TV,” Rooke said. “Fifty-five percent of really heavy sports viewers typically watch three or more sports on a consistent basis.”
Among the findings, fans of professional baseball tend to also enjoy watching hockey, golf and college basketball. First-party data about viewership, which Effectv gathers from set-top boxes, help to track those audiences across different sports programming.
“What’s really critical is being able to start with first-party, deterministic data to drive those types of insights out,” Rooke said. “Against the backdrop of shifting schedules in sports, advertisers can continue to follow their audience despite those changes.”
Audience-First Over Content-First
Sports programming is a major draw on linear TV, giving advertisers a broad platform for mass campaigns. However, the pandemic sped up a longer-term shift in viewing habits that have made audience-based targeting an even bigger priority than contextual, content-first strategies. Consumers are spending their time among a broader variety of media channels — a shift that won’t reverse.
“There’s no going back,” Rooke said. “We’ve seen such a major shift since COVID started toward audience-based buying.”
The change isn’t isolated to sports.
“What happened with sports in our country was really the catalyst more broadly for a shift in the media industry to more audience-based executions,” Rooke said. “That will get accelerated further as viewing continues to fragment against more distribution channels. An advertiser needs the ability to execute, not just across where viewing is taking place on linear television distribution channels, but also across streaming.”
Amid the fragmentation, omnichannel buying strategies deliver better performance for marketers, Effectv found in a study last year.
“We were able to demonstrate that on average campaigns that aired on more networks had double the reach compared to those that executed on less than 10 networks, regardless of spend level,” Rooke said.
The shift in viewing habits also has led the video advertising marketplace, which encompasses linear TV and newer streaming platforms as households connect TVs to the internet, to come to grips with growing competition from tech giants that have powerful targeting tools.
Media buying requires an audience-based and multiscreen approach as consumers watch video a broader variety of devices. However, the TV media marketplace is still divided between among more traditional approaches to measuring reach and newer audience-based strategies in advanced TV.
“Television overall has to simplify how it is bought if we’re going to move toward an audience-based execution. Then, segment definition becomes one of many execution priorities,” Rooke said.
You are watching “Live Sports 2021: What’s Next on TV,” a Beet.TV + VAB leadership video series presented by Effectv, a Comcast company. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>So, how is New York Interconnect (NYI) – a JV of Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast – approaching the growing desire of ad buyers to reach TV viewers across all their screens?
In this video discussion with VAB CEO Sean Cunningham, NYI chief operating officer Tom Donohue explains the approach.
Rebooting linear
NYI integrates multiple TV content platforms under one umbrella. It aims to make 66 million screens in the New York market buyable by advertisers via the JV partners’ services.
That happens using NYI’s Audience One, a platform for enabling the media buys – and, specifically, the TV+ component.
“We’re able to inform a linear schedule,” Donohue says. “We’re using data as the basis for the schedule’s creation. And then, on the backend, we’re able to do one-to-one deterministic evaluations of that platform – meaning that we can show the ad exposure matched to the conversion and tell advertisers, ‘Here’s how successful you’ve been’.
“By doing that, we’re able to even tell them what network daypart programme is better at turning around results for you than others that might’ve been in that schedule so that, going forward, those are data-informed outcomes that then drive the next set of schedules, so that they’re more crafted to exactly what they want.”
Audience One is the easy solution to your simple (or complex) media buys. #Advertising #Ads #AudienceOne https://t.co/BtfkMJuIia pic.twitter.com/JcalaGEHk7
— NewYorkInterconnect (@NYInterconnect) October 27, 2020
Start with TV
Over-the-top TV viewing is booming. OTT streaming services accounted for 25% of all US TV-viewing minutes during Q2 2020, according to Nielsen Streaming Meter.
EMarketer estimates CTV ad spending will reach $10.81 billion in the US in 2021 – up 56% from two years earlier, and representing around 15% of total US TV ad spending.
But ad buyers are faced with the complexities of a fragmented market. They want to be able to buy across platforms and to measure their efficacy holistically.
“TV is a great platform to start with,” Donohue says. “Seventy-five percent of all 18-plus viewers are on TV. And when you complement that with over the top, it’s a multiplier. That multiplier is important for marketers to get that reach that they want.
Follow the audience
Donohue says New York is a great market for over-the-top advertising because of income levels and other audience attributes.
He says the goal is to offer advertisers the ability to reach consumers throughout the day.
“If you check your phone (in the morning), I want to be able to hit you with something,” he says “If an hour later, you’re on the commute and you’re on your iPad, I want to be able to get you there.
“And, if you get to the office and you’re online, I want to get you there.
And if you get home and you’re watching some linear programme, I want to get you there.
And if you’re at nighttime, again, closing down and watching the news, I want to get you there.
So we want to be agnostic from where you’re taking the content, and we want to make sure that we follow you, the audience, wherever you go.”
You are watching “Targeted Strategies, Big Impact: TV Powered by Data, Addressability and Consumer Choice,” a leadership video series from Beet.TV and VAB. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>VAB, an insights-driven organization dedicated to answering marketers’ toughest questions, says it pulled a century of economic data and found one key finding – investment in brand-building pays off.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sean Cunningham, VAB President & CEO, reflects on a year that, for some, may have been as much “make” as it was “break.”
Spending through turmoil
Cunningham says many brands did, indeed, double down this year. Brands like Hotels.com, for example, returned to TV advertising in June.
“We tracked nationally that we’ve seen $460 million worth of new advertising come into the national platform – 110 new brands in 59 categories,” Cunningham says.
“Their heaviest spending period was in the toughest part of the pandemic.
“(In) the three months in the beginning of the economic downturn, we saw a great number of advertisers with very sophisticated data analytics decide to launch on TV in that environment and to great effect.”
On 12/14, we'll be hosting our first complimentary Industry Spotlight Webinar featuring @AHorihuela of @fuboTV & @Inghelbrecht of @TatariTV. Together, they'll share learnings and success strategies for data-driven linear TV buying. REGISTER
https://t.co/RvepZ9ZsDB pic.twitter.com/ZwznLpn82D
— VAB (@VABintel) November 24, 2020
Victors amid chaos
VAB’s research shows brands like Amazon, Walmart, T-Mobile, General Mills and Hershey used the ’08 recession to catapult their growth.
Amazon, for instance, launched its first TV campaign in the middle of the recession in 2008 and saw a compound annual growth rate of 34% between 2008-2012.
VAB’s analysis across 400 brands showed that those who increased spend saw a nearly 70% increase in ROI versus brands that decreased their spend.
Meanwhile, in a study during the 2008 recession, brands that kept their share of voice flat relative to their competitors did not experience any profit growth, whereas 38% of brands who planned increases to their share of voice experienced very large profit growth, VAB’s analysis shows.
Time is now
“For a sophisticated marketer, now is not the time to cut, now is not the time to play it safe,” Cunningham says. “Now is the opportunity to share efficiently in a downmarket.”
“When there is a downturn in certain categories in the amount that people are advertising, now is absolutely the time to invest in the simple principles like making sure that your share of voice eclipses your share of market.
“The return on that in terms of big results is super clear. One of the things that we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of smart, savvy advertisers that are data- and analytically-driven who actually saw 2020 as launch time.”
Hear the perspectives from the leaders and authors of our work for an insider's view on the most important topics in the industry.
— VAB (@VABintel) November 20, 2020
Booming audiences
Cunningham suggests the advertiser opportunity is evident in terms of audience availability. During the pandemic, TV viewing has swelled:
- “67% of people that we polled said that the television set became the center of their house.”
- “50% said they had a dedicated TV set to a news channel pretty much 24/7.”
- “over a third of that population that we pulled went and got another subscription service and went and got another AVOD service.”
“2020 is a year that I think some of us want to forget, but there are changes that we’ll always remember,” Cunningham adds. “The acceleration that we saw … really put us probably a couple of years forward in our evolution. That it’s a good thing for marketers, particularly data-driven marketers.”
You are watching “Targeted Strategies, Big Impact: TV Powered by Data, Addressability and Consumer Choice,” a leadership video series from Beet.TV and VAB presented by New York Interconnect. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We need to move away from transacting on GRPs, and we need to transact on an impression-based model,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, referring to “gross ratings points” that quantify impressions as a percentage of a target population. “It’s 2020, and the fact we’ve not grown a lot on this journey is problematic.”
In this second episode of series co-produced by Beet.TV and video advertising trade group VAB, Rooke shared his thoughts about recent trends with Sean Cunningham, the president and CEO of VAB.
Rooke sees a need for impression-based measurement amid the shift toward multi-screen video consumption. U.S. consumers are forecast to increase their time spent on mobile devices to more than three hours a day this year, up from about two and a half hours in 2018, according to researcher eMarketer. Smartphones give advertisers a way to reach younger consumers who watch their favorite programming throughout the day.
Advertisers and media channels recognize the need for impression-based advertising amid the shift toward a multi-screen, audience-based and addressable world, Rooke said.
“The question is: how do we use this moment now to accelerate it becoming the norm? We need to overcome a series of challenges, including legacy mindsets, incentive structures and system constraints, among others,” he said. “If we don’t do this, then innovation in the television industry is going to be held back — and the only one’s that’s going to gain from that are going to be the tech platforms.”
Lifting DTC Brands
Video channels need to highlight how commercials drive return on investment (ROI) and results at all stages of the purchase funnel, Rooke said. “Last-touch attribution” that gives greater weight to digital ads to convert viewers into buyers devalues the power of television to help drive business outcomes.
“The truth’s on our side here — we just haven’t done a good job as an industry proving it,” Rooke said. “We’re not where we need to be in terms of proof of performance just being de facto, and it should be. When that happens, we’re going to see a shift of dollars away from bottom-of-funnel players as the reality of top to mid-funnel comes to fruition.”
TV and digital are most effective when they work together, Rooke said. He cited internal research that found that when ads air on TV and digital channels, brand recall is twice as high than on digital alone and brand intent is 50% higher. Combining TV and digital are highly effective for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that don’t sell products through traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
“There comes a point where their social channels simply can’t provide the reach they need, and they run into issues with excess frequency,” Rooke said. “Multi-screen television has played an absolutely crucial role in helping them scale and go mass market.”
]]>“Our roots are very much in local advertising,” James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, said. “That said, we are not a local advertising sales business anymore. We are an audience delivery company.”
Rooke shared his thoughts in this first episode of two conversations with Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of video advertising trade group VAB. Beet.TV and VAB co-produced the video series.
‘Sports Audience Didn’t Go Anywhere’
The company has a vast trove of viewing data gleaned from set-top boxes that can be harnessed for audience-based targeting, instead of media buys based on TV networks and dayparts. The data have provided numerous insights, including how the temporary suspension of live sports during the coronavirus pandemic have triggered a shift in viewing habits.
“The sports audience didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t stop watching TV,” Rooke said. “Their viewership has moved elsewhere, in particular to places like news.”
That audience likely is to return as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League resume play — with TV offering the only venue to see games held in empty stadiums. The National Football League next month starts its regular season, which will be significant for linear TV viewership.
Strategies for Brands
With advertisers seeking ways to reach audiences more efficiently, audience-based targeting can help to expand the reach of campaigns and improve return on investment (ROI), Effectv’s Rooke said. The company recently analyzed more than 100,000 campaigns and 30 million commercial airings to find that campaigns airing on more networks had double the reach than on 10 or fewer networks, regardless of spending level.
The health crisis has had a significant short-term effect on media spending, including an expected 18% decline in U.S. TV advertising excluding political campaigns this year, as forecast by GroupM, the media-buying unit of WPP. The firm expects a rebound of 5.9% in TV advertising next year as the economy continues to recover.
Comcast also has worked to develop content to connect advertisers with consumers at the local and national levels. As one example, the company developed a “Hometown Hub” on its Xfinity X1 platform to help viewers find local businesses, including ones that were opening as pandemic lockdowns were lifted.
At the national level, it created a virtual showroom for automotive brands seeking to reach homebound consumers, Rooke said.
He foresees the continuation of several shifts that will change how advertisers reach audiences on a broader variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and TVs. Advertisers will measure reach based on impressions rather than gross ratings points, and will seek to measure how their campaigns affect business outcomes like sales.
“None of those things are groundbreaking insights, I know that,” Rooke said. “What I think is interesting is that the mindset shifts that have taken place in the last five months” of the pandemic.
]]>Magnite, a sell-side platform (SSP) that was formed this year with the merger of Rubicon Project and Telaria, has its eye on the burgeoning market for programmatic video as more marketers shift their media budgets away from the estimated $70 billion market for linear TV advertising. The company aims to be the sell-side equivalent of The Trade Desk, which helps marketers find media inventory as an independent demand-side platform (DSP).
In discussing the recent merger, Magnite CEO Michael Barrett sees the opportunity to build scale for content providers whose ad inventories include a variety of formats in video, audio, mobile and web channels.
“The idea was that publishers are looking to work with fewer partners that can do more for them, and ad tech is notoriously fragmented,” Barrett said in the latest installment of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “We saw an opportunity to create an alternative — an independent, omnichannel play.”
Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of VAB, Barrett said Magnite combines the strengths of Telaria in connected TV (CTV) with Rubicon’s background in display, audio and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising to provide a more unified platform for publishers to connect with media buyers.
“Buyers don’t want to work with five platforms to get the inventory of one media company,” Barrett said. “Our partners on the publishing side can go in full-in on programmatic and still guard the economics that they rightfully fight for, but accommodate what the buyers are asking for.”
‘AVOD Boom’
He anticipates strong growth for AVOD services as consumers look to stretch their limited budgets for subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu and YouTube Premium.
“The most interesting shift is SVOD versus AVOD,” Barrett said. “Two years ago, it was clear that the Netflix model was the model that everyone emulated.”
However, keeping up with Netflix’s annual programming budget, which was forecast to top $17 billion this year, is a daunting proposition for any VOD service that relies only on subscription revenue. By selling advertising, AVOD services gain the financial resources to license higher-quality programming that’s appealing to viewers, while also helping marketers connect with them
“The AVOD world will be booming,” Barrett said. “Consumers have already raised their hand and said, ‘This is how I like to consume content. This is by choice. This is here to stay.'”
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Demonstrating the power of TV advertising increasingly requires more complete data that show how consumers follow the path from seeing an ad to acting upon it. Tracking consumers along this journey, often called the “purchase funnel,” is a key part of making TV more competitive with digital rivals.
“We need to prove that television can do more,” Noah Levine, chief revenue officer of TV analytics firm 605, said in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “The efficacy of television is greater than display, it’s greater than search.”
Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of VAB, Levine recommended that advertisers abandon “last-click” attribution that tends to favor companies further down the sales funnel. Those companies include the digital media giants that are adding more online shopping features to drive direct sales for retailers and brands.
“Last-click attribution has done a major disservice to marketers, agencies, media sellers — basically everyone except for Google and Facebook,” Levine said.
“Full-funnel attribution” that starts with brand lift at the top of the purchase funnel is one way for TV networks and marketers to gauge the effect of ads on “mid-funnel” activities like website visits, foot traffic through mobile geolocation and direct sales, he said.
To track TV viewership, 605 combines set-top box information with automatic content recognition (ACR) data to provide a more complete picture of what viewers are watching. 605 tracks the viewing habits 21 million U.S. households, and projects the information among the general population.
While audience measurement has come a long way since asking people to record their viewing habits in written diaries, there is still room for improvement. Measuring audiences across platforms, including “walled garden” environments like Facebook, and achieving unduplicated reach are a challenge.
“Unfortunately, I don’t believe we as an industry have solved the cross-platform, unduplicated reach problem yet,” Levine said. “We have to be able to process that digital exposure data.”
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>According to a study by iSpot.tv, nearly 26% more brands, accounting for 1,247 more, are advertising on TV today in comparison to a year ago. According to an AdAge article on these findings, this spike could be from two main factors. The first being the disappearance of high-priced live-sports ad inventory, which has left networks with far more lower-priced inventory that’s affordable to a wider range of marketers. Secondly, networks have been working even since before the pandemic to expand accessibility to a wide range of marketers that competes with digital advertising packages from companies like Google and Facebook. This has been appealing to smaller brands.
VAB is noticing similar trends. Their close, six-week look has shown that there’s a surge across all demographics. While there is about a 20% uptick in viewing, there are different trends emerging. For example, teen viewing is up 35%, with a huge uptick in marketing opportunities coming in the middle of the day.
“You’re seeing a lot of pieces of unprecedented market physics where you’ve got audiences in scale that are connected and connected on multi screens and connected for multi hours during the day,” Cunningham says.
This has led to a redistribution of audiences, and genre and demographic boundaries have been broken. Marketers are taking advantage of these new trends of viewing in the age of COVID-19. With extra viewers and new viewing trends has come an increased measurement of scales of consumers.
Programmers are in constant conversation with their slate of advertisers because so many needed to redistribute their plans to address the inventory change. With sports programming and other tentpole live programming events being canceled, programmers are working hard to respond to the needs of advertisers, which has led to many firsts and changes of format within the industry.
“That has to do with the ability to truly partner with the advertisers to understand what these unique challenges are, help them do the type of messaging they need to do, get to the types of audiences they want to get to, and in doing that, you put new pages in the playbook.” Cunningham says.
One of the positives of this increased communication between programmers and advertisers is that it has reaffirmed the need for a large bulk-buying market that is driven by an advertisers needs. This may be remembered as a very different type of Upfront, but it is still based on something scalable, and a large scale at that.
“I think at the end of the day, clear-headed marketers and their great partners are finding a way to find how we make sure everyone can thrive through the new normal and then into something that is more like previous conditions.” Cunningham says.
]]>“My analogy always was what if Mars attacked?” Kline says. “There’s all of these country conflicts, but if our asses were all on the line, just like a good sci-fi movie, we’d have to pull together and make it through. Mars did attack, in the form of Facebook and Amazon and Google. They attacked a few years back, so we’re pulling together now to try and give scale to all this advanced advertising that the ad tech players have been able to do.”
While MVPDs and networks continue to battle each other at times over things like affiliation agreements, they recognize that they need each other for scale in advertising. The resulting data has been enormously helpful in leading smaller businesses to television. Kline cites success stories like Peloton and Wayfair, who have used TV as a leveraging point for growing their brands. Spectrum Reach’s partner strategy also helps bolster its data strategy: Spectrum Reach works with Ampersand to catch up on advertising data collection, while 605 worked with the company to build out an audience app that lets users customize their own schedules.
This has also led MVPDs to explore the use of new products and advanced advertising technology. The launch of an ad portal has been a gateway for businesses of all budgets to get a more advanced look at data and customize advertising that suits them. Kline also mentions an audience app that their partner 605 designed for them that sifts through set-box top data to optimize a schedule.
“That’s been a game changer for us,” Kline says. “That’s taken the conversation away from ‘Just give me ESPN and USA Network’ to 50 networks deep.”
The redefining role of MVPDs as linear and digital continue to evolve has led to more precise data as well as more advanced forms of advertising. Kline says that this creates an environment ripe for opportunity for all stakeholders involved.
“I think from the local perspective to the national perspective, we’re going to make the ecosystem work much better,” says Kline.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“They reflect what the current state of television is, which is full funnel, all the time,” Cunningham told Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat hosted by Horizon Media in New York City. Cunningham says these brands’ TV ad spend has surged to amount to $4 billion, and that their interest in television signifies its newfound status as a performance marketing channel. Used to call-to-action campaigns on Facebook and Google, DTC brands are now looking to TV to do two things at once: build brand awareness and affinity, and drive conversions while gathering audience insights.
That capability didn’t happen overnight. Cunningham says addressable TV is something that marketers were told about for a “better part of a decade” before it became reality. The rise of data stack and tech stack equipped platforms like Facebook and Google – platforms that lack the premium content of TV – lit a fire under the networks, which had the content but not the data or tech capabilities.
“Another race, essentially was on,” says Cunningham, adding that the arrival at addressable is the outcome of networks’ and marketers’ investment in first-party data, as well as the ability to put that data into action. Now, companies can mesh data with the content that drives companies to spend with TV distributors in the first place. “I’m not saying race over, race won, but race well run to say for the marketer, I’m going to run as hard as humanly possible so I can mesh this data with the content as a TV company. That meshing together gets them to a place where they don’t have to decide between content, context and tech. They get it all.”
As marketers adjust to new capabilities of addressable, and look for results, Cunningham says the most important thing to do is to give it time. While there will be short-term results, the real value comes in the long play.
“The first question marketers should ask is how long should I do this. The answer is quarter, after quarter, for a couple of years, because you need to understand the full-funnel implications of what you’re doing,” says Cunningham.
Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>As the average total duration of ads on US TV has climbed to 22 minutes per hour, subscription, ad-free video services have risen in popularity.
That is prompting a recalibration, with many networks committing to air fewer or shorter ads.
But, for the leader of an umbrella group representing premium video and TV publishers, ad load is a symptom of one thing – advertising’s effectiveness.
“Someone can … say something’s too much or too little. But the advertisers themselves, they’re the ones who want to continue to use this medium in all its forms because very simply it works,” says Sean Cunningham, CEO of VAB, in this video interview.
“The reason that there is the multiplicity of ads out there is because of the fact that we have ever more advertisers who want the inventory, and they want the inventory because they’ve got the data and the analytics that say that there’s a bold line between television advertising in all its forms and the outcomes they’re looking for.”
Cunningham’s VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB) and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.
He says viewers and publishers are actually involved in a consensual relationship thanks to advertising.
“There is an understanding essentially that world-class content comes with an ad contract,” Cunningham says. “What we’re seeing is that we are putting ever more relevant ads with ever more relevant stimuli in front of properly identified consumers who are taking actions against them.”
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
]]>“I’d say it’s mature. It’s arrived. We did talk a long time for the promise. Now we’re talking about the delivery,” VAB President and CEO Sean Cunningham says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Forty percent of U.S. “addressable TV agency and marketing professionals” say they are now making a significant investment in the platform, according to the VAB. Seventy-one percent of these marketers have been buying addressable TV for less than one year, signifying a substantial growth opportunity for sellers.
“I think one of the key things that advertisers are realizing is this is a full-funnel medium where they’re going to get full-funnel outcomes,” says Cunningham.
To the VAB, the term “addressable” refers specifically to the platforms and technologies available through MVPDs only. It defines addressable TV as the use of technologies to enable advertisers to selectively deliver ads to individual households via cable, satellite, and Internet Protocol television delivery systems and set-top boxes.
The 60-page guide released by the VAB today is titled Address for Success and includes case studies in more than 10 different product and service categories, including travel and tourism, automotive, TV entertainment, financial, retail furnishings, appliances, beauty retailer and credit cards. Combining linear TV buys with the boost addressable TV offers delivered positive full-funnel outcomes for advertisers across the categories studied, according to the guide.
“What you’re seeing is consistent results in whatever the KPI’s are,” Cunningham says.
Asked about the supply of ad inventory available to target specific households, Cunningham cites 64 million addressable-enabled households, or 54% of total U.S. TV households. “Supply is not a problem. We have plenty of supply.”
The VAB guide estimates that the U.S. addressable TV audience “2 years of age and older” has grown 27% to 162.2 million over the past two years, a larger audience than Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, MSN, LinkedIn, Spotify and many other digital platforms’ monthly unique visitors.
In reference to the annual TV Upfront negotiations, Cunningham describes all of premium video as a 52-week proposition.
“There’s just some long-term prices that are struck at the Upfront and inventory lay-downs. Part of that lay-down is going to be some framework for addressable across a new high level of categories and advertisers. It’s going to be a staple part of what people do,” he says.
]]>But, when each needs a further lift, they turn to television.
That is according to an analysis of a group of 80 “digital disruptors” by the Video Advertising Bureau, an industry body for TV and video companies.
“They all started with digital plans, and they essentially exhausted those plans and they got as far as they were possibly gonna get in terms of how big they were going to get,” says Video Advertising Bureau‘s Sean Cunningham in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“They all made the same big bet, they all bet on television. And not a toe in the water, but a big bet, meaning the future of the company was bet on /Is television going to work or not?’ In terms of pushing at scale, exponentially more productive leads into their site.”
In March, eMarketer forecast 2018 US TV ad spend would fall for the second straight year, as conventional TV audiences shrink and advertisers drive harder at digital, accountable channels.
Of course, Cunningham backs TV and new-line video providers. His VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB0) and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.
He says, for companies like Wayfair, TV and video represents the majority of their ad spending.
He says VAB’s analysis of the 80 companies, whose TV ad spend totals $2.6 billion, shows “the corollary between their upward investment in TV and how it ties directly to their sales increase”.
“Video has been the most powerful thing for them, specifically television and video,” Cunningham says. “You know, they went from a company that had a few hundred million in sales to being a five billion dollar company in less than six years and they’ve used TV as the primary instrument to do that.”
He has no truck with the doom and gloom.
“We’ve seen is a rush of new advertisers,” he says. “And frankly a lot of those new advertisers who are pouring more and more money into TV are frankly hoping that a lot of their competitors are being distracted by headlines, whether it has to do with rating physics or OTT, or all the revolutionary changes that they’re having.”
This interview was conducted at the EGTA New York meetings hosted by Viacom. EGTA, the Brussels-based trade association of international television companies, is the sponsor of this Beet.TV series. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>When studying big-spending, Silicon Valley brands the organization found some striking similarities, according to VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham.
“We found it interesting that the biggest bet that the disrupters were making was, if you will, when it came down to the pivotal moment in their history when they really had to get big, they pushed in all the chips on television,” Cunningham says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
“It seemed that they had grown as far as they were going to grow in a pure digital, pure play world.”
So when the time came to move from thousands to millions of customers and billions of dollars in revenue from millions, “The pattern was just so alarmingly similar.”
Cunningham says it was “alarming” to see the tightness of corollaries between a television schedule going on-air and resulting traction.
“The first set of outcomes that you saw immediately were the most obvious things: site traffic, search queries, a look at their online videos, that type of thing. We understood it as a real transactional medium in terms of driving productive leads. It happens quickly.”
According to the VAB research, 14 Brand Building “disruptors” increased their TV spending 59% in 2016 and saw total digital actions (search queries, social actions and total online views) rise by 184% year over year.
The VAB membership includes virtually all of the national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPD’s, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business. “By the end of the year, we’ll probably have members in every single video advertising format that exists,” says Cunningham.
The “simple description” of the VAB is that “we exist to answer the unanswered questions for advertisers and agencies,” including cross-screen viewership.
Among those questions are how to unlock the keys to “how do you add it all up how does it all work, what does it all do and how do we keep track of all the moving parts.
“The industry’s challenge now is to measure it all, count it all and find a way to fluidly assign the various roles and tasks, outcomes and attributes to each of it. I think that’s going to keep us more than busy,” adds Cunningham.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
]]>But, if you are an advertiser, nothing beats the power wielded by premium video, according to one man representing the interests of big TV companies.
“There are platforms and all sorts of conduits that are getting good quality video whose being distributed on so many different conduits and platforms,” says Sean Cunningham, CEO of th Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“And, yet, in that environment, in any given minute, in this country, 91% of all video is consumed on television. Eighty-eight percent of all video, in any given minute, for millennials is consumed on television.
“The overwhelming, sort of, nationwide addiction to video has never been stronger. As it proliferates and we just make more of it, what we find is there’s just an endless appetite for high-quality, premium video.”
Cunningham should know. His VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB0 and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.
In a new piece of work, it seeks to expose the “Echo Chamber Effect“, in which it says views grown in to trends have escalated in to reports of seismic change that have spread like wildfire throughout the advertising industry – but which are untruths.
The work skewers beliefs that digital is disrupting traditional TV as fast as many claim it is, saying “less than 1 % of cable+ households have cut the cord in 2016 and 2017”.
And, despite heavy investment from Netflix and Amazon in to original premium programming, Cunningham tells Beet.TV it is incumbents who still make the industry tick.
“My members, ad-supported television, they’ve spent over the past five years, $225,000,000,000 on original content,” he adds. “A hit television show right now needs to be distributed on as many as 90 different platforms. What the great arbiter should be to marketer is committed attention.”
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